It’s honestly so fucked up that I have to worry in leftist spaces that talking about rehabilitative justice will lose me friends.
In 2010 I took a class called Terrorism in the Modern World, which was one of the best classes I’ve ever taken. We learned all about the causes and cyclical effects of terrorism, about why people get seduced by dangerous worldviews, about how we cannot possibly offer more than palliative solutions until we reckon with the task of trying to understand them. About how futile America’s endless escalations have been. It was awesome.
The following year, when Osama bin Laden was killed, all my liberal friends joined me in reminding the world that he might have done terrible evil, but he was still a human being. We huddled together to grin smugly about how much more empathetic we were than those evil hawkish conservatives. Not that I endorse that, but we were 18. Point is, at the time we construed liberalism, and leftism more broadly, as an explicit rejection of the vengeful, punitive ethic that was blanketing our world. And I know we were not alone in that. Liberals around me talked about prison reform, about transitions from criminal dysfunction back to a productive life, about reaching out to the people who were hardest to reach. I was, at that time, proud to call myself a bleeding-heart liberal.
And now I’m seeing them, the very same leftists who joined me in calling for empathy with our enemies, posting endless diatribes against those they deem too far gone for any kind of understanding. The same people who stood up in a sea of patriotic zeal and reminded us that terrorists were real human beings with motivations beyond mustache-twirling villainy are the people I see calling Trump supporters garbage, calling them worthless, calling any attempt to understand them “collusion with the oppressor”. I’m over here advocating the same exact outreach I’ve advocated all my life, the same outreach you once praised me for, but now because it’s your pet enemy I’m evil and weak and awful for it.
These were once my people, and now I don’t recognize them. I’m horrified to see them acting exactly like post-9/11 nationalist zealots, dismissing any attempt at understanding or empathy as spineless, as cowardly, as oppressive. You think I haven’t heard this all before? I’ve heard it all my life. I was a child when 9/11 happened. I don’t remember a United States not at war in the Middle East. My whole life I’ve been a pacifist, raised by pacifist parents in a pacifist community, and my whole life I’ve heard that trying to understand and reach out to your enemy instead of fucking annihilating them was weak and cowardly and siding with the terrorists. The difference is that I once had the left on my side.
Your principles do not cease to apply when it’s your pet enemy on the chopping block. Believe it or not, people who got cruel and hawkish in the face of terrorism were exactly as scared and powerless-feeling as you are now. They weren’t spouting martial rhetoric out of pure evil – there was real fear there, but they let it make them into hateful people with no sense of empathy or common humanity. Like hell I’m going to let that happen to people I once called mine.
Holy fuck, this.
The reason I don’t want to punch Nazis today is because I had all the violent graphic appalling vengeance fantasies about bin Laden…
…and by the time we got him I didn’t believe in war any more.
If we believe that extremism is seductive, why do we want to punch the people it seduces? Does half of Tumblr have some weird belief that a good whack on the head will dislodge it, like curing a mindwiped character in a cartoon show?
Thiiiiiiiiiiiiis
I can respect people who draw their lines for “When is punching the guy considered an act of defense, rather than offense?” in a different place than I do. But a lot of what I’m seeing on the Left (not just on Tumblr, but in a lot of Leftist spaces) is straight up warmongering on a small scale.
Now, I’m a Filthy Liberal, not a true Leftist, so maybe this is one of those idealogical differences that I didn’t pick up on until I understood the distinction between those two things, but…I seem to recall a time when pacifism (real pacifism, not the Batman kind) was considered a virtue on the Left.
And I can’t help but see a connection between the fact that the people who really loudly advocate punching Nazis (and honestly, I find myself struggling to care about whether or not Nazis get punched. It’s the people who merely Look Sortof Like Nazis I’m worried about) are the same people who call shippers Actual Child Molesting Pedophiles. And then those same people move from sending anon hate to doxxing and organizing mass calls to people’s bosses and to CPS and shit.
And now we’re right back to punching Nazis, except that we’re trying to ruin the lives of child molesters, except that anyone we don’t like is a Nazi or a child molester, except that when that stops working we’ll call them something else (maybe we’ll call them terrorists), and really we don’t even know who we’re shooting at anymore but goddamn it feels good to pull that trigger.
And in my head? All I’m seeing is scared, angry redneck neighbors threatening a terrified woman in a headscarf because she sortof looks like what the warmongers told us the wives of the people who attacked New York City might have looked like, and that’s enough to brand her Terrorist ‘round these parts and we don’t hold with Terrorists here.
When they say “violence begets violence,” they don’t mean the people you punch are gonna punch you back. They mean that when you run out of people to punch (or can’t reach the dude you really wanna mangle,) you’re gonna broaden the criteria for who’s an acceptable target. Osama Bin Laden becomes All Terrorists becomes Anyone Who Looks Vaguely Middle Eastern.
I wonder if the reason we’re seeing this same logic among Leftists and Liberals now is because so many of them are the kids who grew up post 9/11; in the era of warmongers telling us all to punch an amorphous and difficult to identify Enemy for the good of American Decency. And even if they recognized that the “looks like a terrorist” criteria is bullshit, they still internalized the underlying message: Violence Against the Enemy is Righteous.
All they needed was a different enemy.
I wonder if the reason we’re seeing this same logic among Leftists and
Liberals now is because so many of them are the kids who grew up post
9/11; in the era of warmongers telling us all to punch an amorphous and
difficult to identify Enemy for the good of American Decency. And even
if they recognized that the “looks like a terrorist” criteria is
bullshit, they still internalized the underlying message: Violence
Against the Enemy is Righteous.
I believe in rehabilitative justice because I’ve seen it work, honestly.
And I’ve seen so many people who were nominally defending me or people like me end up broadening the “people I can attack” criteria until they included me… You know after a while the pattern sinks in.
Ben Carson is such a great example of how the concept of raw intelligence doesn’t exist, and that people can have wildly varying types of intelligence. This man is the best brain surgeon in America. Possibly the world. He invented a new way to treat seizures. He separated conjoined twins in a surgery that everyone else said was impossible. And he thinks going to prison makes you gay. He thinks the pyramids were grain silos built by the biblical Joseph.
So maybe you suck at something because in one area you’re Ben Carson The Politician but in another area you might be Ben Carson The Neurosurgeon.
this is tremendously inspiring and utterly horrifying at the same time
Unsourced screencap making the rounds on Facebook.
yeah, pretty much this. there is no such thing as ‘white culture’.
the one ethnic pride fest i wish existed that doesn’t is “dude i have no idea what all is up in there” pride. both for the many white americans who have no idea where their ancestors came from (not all families were literate, some folks are adopted, etc), and for people like me who have an ancestry from “sort of all around that general vicinity over there.” i mean, i go to the czech heritage festival and that’s pretty great, but there’s no kazakh or mongolian or “idk some uyghur guys in northern china we think probably” festival. anyway, we could call it Mutt Fest and it could be a lot of fun. we could have fusion food and dance to afro-celts. 😀
We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives. Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism (via prawnofsatan)
I’m a broken record about this but I cannot stand pop radicalism
I mean, the sort of thing where say a post on tumblr gets like 50,000 notes despite assuming a political worldview that if actually adopted would require a wholesale rejection of existing society, probably a vast restructuring of one’s life, probably a vigorous involvement in direct action, and while there may be 50,000 people out there who are doing that, you just know that most of those notes were just from people looking at the post and thinking “huh, this sounds cool and right-on, I guess”
People seem to be leading these weird double lives, where they will just act like “normal people” and then occasionally mouth statements that sound like they come from radical pamphlets like yeah, of course, everyone thinks that, right? and then they just carry on like it means nothing
I respect people who believe this stuff and consistently talk about it like they mean it, but I’m really confused by the people who are in the middle like this
eh, it’s youth. extreme things are very exciting when you’re twenty. when you’re filled with desperate, helpless rage at genuine evil for the first time, not DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT RIGHT THE FUCK NOW seems like the dumbest, most cowardly, most terrible thing.
and then you get off tumblr and look at your life, and like… ok but where exactly do i throw the molatov cocktail? my boss’s office? what happens to my cat if i go to jail? and i have a date on friday and i haven’t seen wonder woman yet. maybe i will go to work like normal today. just for now. just for a while.
eventually you’re thirty or forty, you have a kid, you have a house maybe, some things you’ve worked and scraped to get and keep, and you realize that when you see a picture in the newspaper of some college boy in a mask throwing a flaming bottle, you don’t think “yeah! direct action!!” you think “FIRE IS NOT SAFE FOR CHILDREN STAY AWAY FROM US.” when someone talks about how property is theft, you think, “is that code for you’re going to steal my stuff for the greater good? where will we sleep? what will my children eat?”
when you’re twenty, you have little to lose and a lot of feelings. so you like and reblog and talk about ANGRY COOL ACTION POLITICS FOR HEROES. and probably that’s all you do, because you’re not actually suicidal and you do like living indoors. but the feelings are genuine. the anger is real. hell, the people the more excitable antifascists want to kill with baseball bats are mostly pretty horrible and i would definitely not want to be stuck in an elevator with them. so i wouldn’t say it’s fake or a pose.
i try not to rain on their parade too often. sometimes i just can’t help myself, though. i have the dad nature. every so often i have to be like THAT IS ENOUGH RUNNING WITH SCISSORS FOR ONE DAY PLEASE. sometimes people listen and sometimes they don’t.
cashier: sorry for your wait. we’re short-staffed today
millennial: oh that’s ok no worries 🙂
baby boomer:
But listen that’s the thing.
We are short staffed almost 97% of the time at my retail job. Because corporate has figured out you can overwork 4 people at minimum wage instead of paying for the 8 people you should probably have to be on the clock.
Baby boomers grew up with stores that were adequately staffed, with workers who most likely had weeks of training for their jobs as opposed to the 1-2 shadow shift training we get now. Also those workers most likely were able to be full time if they wanted. Now retail, except for management positions, is mostly made up of part time workers, because you don’t have to give them benefits. So you have a workforce of perpetually underpaid, overwhelmed, undertrained people trying to do their best all while dealing with an entire generation of people who refuse to acknowledge that the system has changed and the average retail worker has NO control over that change and is being taken advantage of.
Like we got our customer surveys back, and almost every single one mentioned that they couldn’t find someone to help them or we needed more people on register because it was TOO SLOW, but what did management tell us instead of scheduling more people? We need to be quicker on register and call for backup if necessary. Which makes no sense because we can’t call for backup THAT ISN’T THERE.
Y’all my parents haven’t worked retail since the 70s and they absolutely never believe me about the things that happen at work. I explain the schedule for next week gets hung up on the Friday before and they scoff and go “well when i worked at X they had it a month up your manager is just lazy.” No mom, its company policy to only do “two weeks” in advance. They won’t give you a full month’s scheduling in advance cause it let’s you plan for a world outside of work.
Or about the hours, workload or anything. They just assume its an individual’s failing instead of corporate mandate. Or, if they do believe me (that its company policy) they call it ridiculous and point out some survey that argues its Good Business to do (insert decent thing here).As if they think the higher ups don’t know this and are simply ignorant of Good Business Practices. They don’t understand that retail has completely shifted from caring about its employees to squeezing out every penny now instead of investing it for later.
Cause that isn’t how it was when they worked and they just can’t seem to see otherwise.
I think there should be a ‘bring-your-parent-to-work-day’ instead of ‘bring-your-kid-to-work-day’, it would shock so many parents and would probably make them finally realize how much retail indeed has changed in the US.
when i first got hired as a cashier, my manager who had been doing that since she was like 17 in 1975 told me that back in The Days, when you were hired as a cashier in a grocery store it was a) a well paid job & you could get full time work easily b) a respected career choice c) the store closed at 6pm and was closed on Sundays so the hours were a lot more pleasant d) they made you go to cashier school for 2 weeks, which was basically a fake grocery store and you just learned the trade completely before even meeting a customer now its like : you get like 20 hours a week, bullshit shifts like 3:45 to 10:15, a 20 minutes training before being thrown to the wolves, customers tell you you deserve your shitty lowlife job as soon as you don’t thoroughly kiss their ass
The millennial experience is tied to growing income inequality and the indentured servitude of student loan debt
Trump is willing to run the most unimaginable political and even criminal risks to block even the beginnings of a serious probe into his business history and the 2016 election. We are far, far past the point where there is any credible reason to doubt that President Trump is hiding major and broad-ranging wrongdoing. No mix of ego, inexperience, embarrassment or anything else can explain his behavior. It just can’t. He’s hiding bad acts. And the country is likely heading toward a major constitutional and political crisis because Trump is signaling that he will not allow the normal course of the law to apply to him – a challenge which puts the entire edifice of democratic government under threat.
just moving along like everyone else 